Minecraft coming to iOS (sorta)

It’s been a long time coming, but Minecraft is finally making the leap to iOS in the form of Minecraft: Pocket Edition. The insanely popular smash-hit indie game has been gobbling up PC CPU cycles for a while now, but it’ll arrive on Android on the 29th of September (if that’s your thing) and iOS before the end of the year.

The game is a free-roaming virtual sandbox in which you are plopped into a virtual world with nothing but your wits and your elbow grease to protect you. Tools and shelter (from what? From monsters, of course) become available as you hack down trees and, over time, develop tools and more sophisticated implements to survive. Interestingly, almost anything can be built within the game so long as you’re willing to put in the time and energy. “So what?” you may say. “I do the same thing with my professions in World of Warcraft”. No, this is a bit past that. Users have recreated the entire Starship Enterprise, an actual working 386 PC and just the other day I heard about this dude who recreated the entirety of Ultima 6 in-world. So, yeah. Let me know once you’ve built one of those down the street from Stormwind.

There’s no word yet on an exact release date, nor a price, but there’s a nice video over at MacLife that’ll give you some idea of how the game plays on a mobile device. Good news: It looks like it plays just great.